Time to start a new doll...

The next ADO challenge is Jack Frost...I haven't decided to enter or not.  But after finishing three dolls in a row, I have nothing to work on, and my work room is calling to me.  Sooooo time to start another one (or three).  This morning I watched an episode of Craft Lab (love this show) and the guy was using good old fashioned clay.  Maybe the new dolls should be ceramic?  I haven't gotten to work out there in ages, and the weather's cooling off so it'll be really cozy out there w/ just a little space heater.

Now if I can only free up some time from all the real estate and holiday chores, not to mention the regular household ones, you might find me out in the Pottery House.  :~)

This is Jo.

She's a challenge doll, created to answer the Inspired by the Masters ADO challenge.  I chose James Whistlers' "Symphony in White No. 1"--which he had originally called The White Girl--as my inspirational masterpiece.

The painting was completed in 1862, but not well received, finally gaining entry into the Salon des Refusés, an exhibition held in Paris in 1863 to show work that had been refused by the selection committee of the official Salon. "Symphony" was in good company, however: Manet, Cézanne, and Camille Pissarro, were among other major artists represented at the exhibition. Despite its original aura of ridicule, the Salon des Refusés was a starting point for artists who began to ignore Napoleon's blessings to organize their own exhibitions, establishing 1863 as the accepted beginning of modern painting.

The model was Joanna Hiffernan, Whistler's mistress.  Given an era in which an unmarried mistress modeling for her lover in the nude was considered little better than a prostitute, Jo called herself Mrs. Abbott to better help him sell his paintings.  The vacant expression and stiff pose of the girl in the painting, resplendent in gauzy white wedding lace, fostered quite a number of interesting--and erroneous--interpretations of the painting.  Mr. Whistler had conducted an exercise in color and tone, an example of Art for Art's Sake.

Reading about her, the reactions to the painting, and the history of her modeling for other artists, I couldn't help but find inspiration in Jo for a doll.  Grateful that the ADO challenge guidelines allowed for interpretations rather than slavish copies, I let Jo develop as she saw fit, and the result seems to mock everything about the era--the art world, the hypocrisy of societal mores, even her own place in Whistler's life.    
  
In response to the irony of Jo's story, I began with a beer bottle weighted with Plaster of Paris.  Paper clay over foil and wire armatures made up the head, upper torso, hands and arms.  I covered the body and head with blank newsprint, adding commentary snippets from a racy romance novel.  (My favorite is the word 'family': Jo helped to raise Whistler's illegitimate son by another woman.)  Washes of color--all the different tones of "white"--cover the decoupage of papers, antiqued overall.  The arms are dressed in the satin, lace and ribbon of a bride...what I felt to be Jo's tongue in cheek response the 'bride after her wedding night' interpretation of the painting.


When I finished, and said so, Phil was shocked.  "You're not going to give her any hair?"  Joanna Hiffernan was famous for her Irish beauty and wavy auburn tresses.  But I liked the in-your-face attitude of this Jo as she was, with her private smile and bright green feather. 

Giving Thanks...

What are you thankful for?  A friend of mine up in Henrietta TX, (wave Hi Donna!) has been running a month-long Facebook theme of what she's thankful for.  As lives go, there have been much better and much worse lives than hers, but hers sure as hell ain't been easy...which is why her determination to count her blessings inspires me so.  Even if you have to get down to the fundamental or the ridiculous--thankful to not have lobsters eating my eyeballs this morning--there is always, I repeat, ALWAYS something to be thankful for.

This year, we'll probably go to Luby's or some place for dinner, because
a. The Phillip doesn't really care about thanksgiving food of any kind, and would rather go hiking...and
b. It's just the two of us, as usual, down here in South Texas, with our family spread out all over the world.  Literally.

But that doesn't mean I am immune to the sparkly contagion of the holiday spirit that has been floating around.  (Said spirit to be the subject of a later post.)  The leaves on the oaks out front are finally changing color, and the weatherman promised a freeze in the hill country to ring in Black Friday for San Antonio shoppers.  I'm grateful that they fixed the broken water main out front yesterday and that our roof keeps the rain out.  Grateful to feel healthy, grateful that my family, however scattered, is also healthy.  I'm grateful that my husband makes me laugh every single day, and that my dog loves his foster cat.  There are so many things I'm thankful for, it would make for really boring reading.  But I do have a point.  (Really?  Yes.)

I am grateful for Donna's insistence that we LOOK at the blessings in our lives, and not just trot them out by rote, taking them for granted, numbly following a What Are You Thankful For routine because the calendar shows the fourth Thursday in November.  Thanks Donna...you are an inspiration and a great lady.

Now...having said that...what are YOU thankful for today?

New doll series...

I've begun a series of dolls I dreamed of last summer...going to call them Garden Girls.  Not tres originale, but it suits them.  Ivy is the first...newly listed. 

Ivy on Etsy

Finished my first doll challenge.

So the challenge on Art Dolls Only--at least the recent mini-challenge--was to make a doll with a medium we've never used before.  I've played with so many materials over the years, not necessarily with dolls, but other arts.  The one art medium I've wanted to try to make a doll of?  Junk.  Yeah, just whatever my little dumpster-diver mind can scrounge up around here.

(The husband is frugal and practical, but he does cringe sometimes at what I drag home.)

She has a mixer beater wrapped in a ribbon skirt as a beginning, some copper wire and 30-06 shells for arms, wall mirror brackets for hands, shelf-bracket plugs for feet (w/ a little paperclay and glitter.)  Her face is sculpted paperclay with upholstery tack eyes and a ball-chain mouth on an orange juice tin-lid, with curly red wire hair.  Her upper body is paperclay illustrated with a decoupage of the one who broke her heart.  Couldn't resist pointy acorn cap boobies...

I began this doll with the idea to make a "Kitchen Angel" but somehow she morphed into a Single Career Girl of the fifties, smiling with determined cheerfulness because that's what Nice Girls do.  Her smile doesn't get anywhere with the old matrons of the place, however.  They see her hour-glass figure and judge her shiny glitter...and whisper, "It's not my place to say, but that one...she's been known to stir up trouble."

I enjoyed the chance to stretch a little, try something I've always wanted to try, and experience the absolute joy of experimentation.  Thank you Art Dolls Only for the challenge!

Really?

I tried to go back to the "Classic" blogger templates.  Riiiiight.  You can, of course, but you can't do anything TO them once you select one.  So what good are they?  You can't use them to make the blog window wider, which is what I'd tried to go back for in the first place.  So, a plain old template, but narrow, boring, and un-customizable.  Why don't they just get rid of that option, if they won't let you do anything with it?

Getting more and more frustrated with Google Blogger.

For the now, I like the winter scene, because down here, this is as much snow as I'll ever see. 

Introducing: Sonny the Studio Elf.

He's young, as Elf Years go--he's only 324 yrs old--still, there is that unfortunate comb-over thing.

He's a little stuck in his ways and fashion sense, and resolutely refuses to alphabetize anything, but otherwise, he's glad to join you as a companion through thick (paint) and thin.  He's got wire joints and will sit with his feet over a shelf, but his arms are not as pose-able as his feet, because he holds a nicely broken-in paintbrush (okay, it's one that someone let harden w/ sealer in it).  Sonny has a dry but wealthy sense of humor.  Don't believe everything he says...

Okay, Google Blogger, FIX THIS.

So far over the last week and a half, it seems every other time I try to "Follow" another blog, I get a message that apologizes for not being able to complete my request and to "Please try again another time."

Not cool.  Not cool at all.  Google Blogger folks, are you listening?

I'm an ADO member now!

Geek-dweeb-doofus-nerd-dorkfish warning: Squeeeeee!

Okay.  I got to join Art Dolls Only.  Now, I realize this was not the most difficult and elite membership to join, and they are nice enough to extend the invitation to a total of 125 members, and they have recently revamped the membership to freshen things up a bit.  But Squeeeeee! anyway.  I think these people are some of the most talented, imaginative and inspiring artists in the world, and I'm honored to get to pal around with them as an ADO member.

As the hubs and I are currently in the process of buying and (soon) rehabing a rent house, my time is eaten up with lenders, contractors, inspectors, etc.  But I'm stoked about the prospect of adding new artist links and blogs here for you to explore, and having so much inspiration for artwork to investigate...


The best part?  Challenges.  Constant challenges to fire up the imagination, keep us involved and creative.  The first challenge I've joined is "Medium Mayhem".  The goal: make a doll using a medium I've not worked with before.  One thing I've been itching to try is Assemblage Art, (going to have to buy that danged Dada book) and that is where I'm going with this one.

But for now, I have to get off this computer, go get my shower, and head out to our future-rent-house and walk around with general contractors.  Exciting, in its way, but not near as fun as making dolls!
Hope your Thorsday is a blast.
Jan

The Fall Garden

I spent the summer tending to pretty much anything BUT the garden, but with the cooler temperatures and a little bit of Fall rain (or is that rainfall?) things have managed without me.  In the last month I've picked probably 10 lbs of peppers--bell, Anaheim, and yellow banana peppers.  They're great to eat fresh and the first two are perfect for chopping up and freezing for quick cooking.

Besides the unexpected bounty of peppers, some of the landscaping has seen fit to bless us with a flower show.  So I thought I'd pass along the blessing.

 

Pink and Red Turk's Cap, just off the back deck.

The actual "caps".  Hummingbirds love these.

Turk's Cap fruit.  Edible, but not tasty except in tea.

Care for a cuppa?

I was too late to catch the moonflowers before they started closing up for the morning.  They bloom at night...

...and have taken over the end of the house.  

"Yellow Bells" Esperanza...against a 6' fence.  It's usually full of very busy, very happy bumble bees.

No, the tree isn't blooming: it's dead.  But the Coral Vine I planted at the base of it has climbed and done a nice job of decorating, don't you think?  

One of my all-time favorites...Asters.  Bees love these too, and so do the butterflies.

Cardinal Creeper...creeping up the carport.

Cardinal creeper up close: more hummingbird food.

This is "Old Man's Beard" clematis, a Texas Native... 

The flowers are insignificant, but the seed heads make up for it.

So...that's the tour.  I love living in a place where we can grow stuff all year long!

The Haircut.

Got a haircut yesterday.  This is not really huge news for lots of people who get haircuts all the time.  But...in the last fifteen or sixteen years, I can count professional haircuts on one hand and still have several fingers left over.

For weeks now, I've been discouraged by my five-year attempt to grow long hair.  I'd finally grown out the bangs and gotten it long enough to do pretty much whatever I wanted--wear it down, in braids, or in dressy up-do's.  I'd gotten where I'd tried to go, but ugh!  My hair refused to be the lush long locks I had envisioned when I decided I'd grow it out come hell or old age.  Thin, graying, thin, and flat w/out tons of hair stuff, (did I mention thin?) and just generally dismal.  I'd fought the urge to chop, every day for at least a week, talking myself down from the ledge and putting it up in clips to get it off my face.

Yesterday, I snapped.  Driving home from the doctors appointment, I pulled into a little salon, aptly named: Hair Salon; Open.  Seriously.  To be honest, I had put in a call to a good friend to ask for a recommendation, but she didn't answer and I was ready to do it NOW before I chickened out.  It's only hair, right?  It'll grow back.

So in I go to Yolanda's Hair Salon.  The lack of cars out front did not deter me.  Behind the desk was this tiny, elderly Hispanic lady.  Presumably Yolanda herself.  I told her I was ready to have an actual hairstyle, asked to peruse her hairstyle magazines.  She barely spoke English, but reassured me that I could take all the time I needed.  I went through an old issue of Hairstyle Quarterly, or some such 'zine, and after maybe 6 & a half minutes, had made my decision.  I'd have a longish shag, reminiscent of the 70's.

If there was an Olympic Event for Patience with a Salon Client, Yolanda would wear the gold.  She started w/ bangs, began to layer, all the while murmuring in her broken and sometimes incomprehensible English, that short is MUCH better for "teen" hair.  Since I'm 47 yrs old, I can only assume she was saying 'thin'.  After a half inch here, a half inch there, she'd hand me the mirror and ask me to see.  I'd say, "No, shorter.  Less bulk here, and more volume there."  She had managed nicely to approximate the look I'd asked for, especially since the model in the magazine was a gorgeous young blond and I'm a somewhat faded middle aged pale brown...but looking backward in the mirror, I could see that what I'd managed to do was find that very haircut that I'd fought against for YEARS.

See, to me, cutting your hair because "older women shouldn't try to wear their hair long" is bullshit.  I LOVE to see long hair on old women.  It's like a celebration of the crone, a victory that says "I am still a woman, no matter how gray and wrinkled I become."  To cut my hair was to concede to a "Should" and I resisted in the name of aging women everywhere.  But here I was, looking at that Compromise that middle-aged women can fall into, afraid of the really short hair because we're convinced that it's only for

a. Adorable toddlers,
b. Waif-like super-models or
c. Elderly Ladies w/ blue permanent curls.

The Compromise, while not ugly--indeed my hair actually has soft waves when it's not weighed down--made me feel more depressed than the original straggly longish un-style I'd walked in with.  At least then I was a rebel.  Now I was a Conformist.  Oh no.  This would never do.

"Okay, Yolanda, don't be mad, but let's try this one instead."  I turned the magazine to a style I'd seen (and longed for) earlier, but hadn't had the guts to try.  "This one...only a little whispier around the face.  Whispier proved to be problematic English, but we got through it.  Only she didn't believe me about the really short style, because it took another half hour to get her to really start CHOPPING.  When I felt actual chunks of hair falling down, I said "There you go!  NOW you're doing it!"  She laughed and said "Djou reelly are reddy!"

I really was ready!  The finished results look a little like this, only softer, not spiky, in a mousy brown instead of the hot auburn, and on a much plainer me instead of this beautiful lady.  But when I left the salon, I floated, head up, feeling the breeze on my newly liberated nape.  I think I was taller, too.

When the hubby saw it, he reminded me that my hair was even shorter than this when he met me and we fell in love.  I bet butterflies feel this way when they finally get out of the cocoon.

Edited to add: Pictures.  Please note--I had no makeup, it'd been a long and breezy day and I hadn't actually BRUSHED my hair all day.  But we had beers, a camera, and he'd been teasing me about how different I looked.  So...pics of the 'do.

(Click on the pic to enlarge, and use the Back button to return. I'd advise against enlarging, but there y'go.  :~)

 

 

Folk art Christmas Elf Doll

I haven't named her...and am open to suggestions at this point.  But I have always felt there needs to be more girl elves for the holidays, and so here's one I made of cloth and paperclay and paint.

This was my second experiment in paperclay sculpted over a cloth doll.  The first one was a rounded, pieced head, this one was a flat, rag-doll head.  I like her a lot.  One of the dangers of making dolls is...I want to keep them all!  (This one especially since I collect Christmas Elves!)

Reminder--turn the page!

Just got around to flipping the calendar page from October to November.  And what to my wondering eyes did appear?  An appointment with Dr. Clark growing near!  Tomorrow, to be exact.  Made this one ages ago, just check-up type stuff.  This must be why they always call with Reminders...people like me who forget to use the tools!

I'm currently working on a doll for Kim...it's a Doll Swap game from Zan Asha's blog:

Click here to go see!

Kim, my doll swap partner, is the owner and artist at Soggy Dog Studios, and does wonderful folk art painting.  I can't wait to see what she comes up with, because our mutually-agreed-upon theme is decidedly Elfin in nature.  (I love elves!)  Right now, the one I'm making for her is in the beginning stages (drying, layer by layer) but I'm already growing fond of him.  Pictures will appear here when the season grows near.  (Am I channeling Dr. Seuss?) 

Real Estate.

So we've been working on investments...real estate for rentals.  Put an offer on one, but the rehab necessary to make it live-in-able is daunting.  Still a good deal, but oh boy. It's a foreclosure, of course, which is what makes it a good deal for an investment.  LOTS of room for improvement to get it to market value.  Nothing structural, but...

what baffles me is how people can treat a house the way this one was treated. 

I really don't understand it.  I'm not house-proud--one impromptu visit to our place would prove that in an instant.  But we respect our home--even if it's a rented home--because of all it does for us.  Gives us boundaries, protection, walls to paint (okay, this might not appeal to everyone), fresh water and a solid floor.  A house gives us a place to curl up when the world outside is just too big/noisy/indifferent/mean.  A house gives us a place (and sometimes a reason) to celebrate, a place to welcome and enjoy our loved ones in.  Yes, it's "just" a house.  I've had to remind myself that a time or two when I was sad to leave one we'd grown to love.  But how is it possible to do damage, to neglect caring for, to disrespect this wonderful thing that has done nothing but protect and serve?

I'm sure there's an explanation for why people treat a house the way some people do.  Not sure I'd buy anything as a good reason, however.

If we do end up buying the current offer, (or one like it with such "special needs"), I'll have to remain diligent in my efforts to NOT grow attached, and remember to keep my professional, unemotional, business-like head on straight.  I can't really make it up to the poor thing for how badly it was treated--it is, after all, an inanimate object, right?

I may plant some flower seeds, though.  Maybe they'll remind the new tenants just how great a house can be if you take good care of it.